Thursday, May 21, 2009

Developing addons for Firefox requires knowledge on Javascript, XUL and XML. If you know none of the above but do know the ins and out of HTML and web designing, you can still design simple extensions for Firefox, thanks to the new Mozilla project JetPack.

Jetpackis an API that allows anybody with knowledge on HTML, CSS and Javascript to write Firefox addons. Mozilla says that Jetpack addons can be written in under a dozen lines of code. What’s more? Addons built through JetPack can be installed without restarting the browser.

Jetpack is still a very early open source project, it’s a prototype actually. The initial Jetpack APIs support features built for status bars, tabs, content-scripts, animations, and more. It also support external API libraries like Twitter and supports jQuery.

Interested developers may checkout the following introductory video, or jump right into the project with available tutorials and documentations.